The major thrust areas identified were development of a quality assurance mechanism, making systems and procedures simple, transparent and more consumer friendly, and third, revamping the mechanism for sales realisation, resolution of disputes and settlement of outstanding dues. In the entire exercise CILs eleven regional sales offices will play a crucial role.

The Rs 20,000-crore coal monolith, which has been maintaining a market share of around 83 per cent for a long period, started feeling the pressure particularly in the last fiscal when its share dropped to 82 per cent despite a growth in production and sales in absolute terms. In the first half of the current fiscal, its share fell further to 81 per cent.

On the other hand, coal import has gone up from 18.1 million tonne (mt) in 1998-99 to 19.3 mt last fiscal. The figure for the first half of the current fiscal has been 11.3 mt.

"No doubt, CIL's market share in overall all India demand is showing a tendency of marginal slippage. But framing of our new strategy is not a panic reaction to that," CIL's marketing director, Sudesh Mohan Sharma told The Financial Express.

"In fact, we are convinced that coal deregulation, liberalisation of coal import under open general licence with less tariff barrier, and environment protection regulation enforcing use of coal with less than 34 per cent ash in eco-sensitive areas have put us in a challenging turf. Here, we have to take up customer orientated coal marketing, effective and innovative pre and after sales services to keep our market share intact."

India imports around 10 mt of coking coal consumed by the integrated steel plants, 6.5 mt of non-coking coal and the rest metcoke and other types of hard coke. Of the non-coking coal, around 6 mt goes to cement manufacturing sector. In case of coking coal, there has been no alternative to imports since India does not have much reserves.

Virtually, each tonne of imported coal replaces 1.4 tonne to 1.5 tonne of Indian coal. This is accentuating CIL's problems despite 10 per cent to 12 per cent increase in prices of imported coal in last four months.The problem of ash reduction could be addressed by setting up washeries either by the power utilities or by CIL itself. But neither profit-making nor loss-making state electricity boards are not interested in setting up their own washeries. If CIL wants to set up washeries it would require at least Rs 1,500 crore. The cash-starved PSU is not in a position to invest a sum like that at a time when its outstanding dues are about Rs 6,500 crore. CIL's largest sectoral customer is the power sector which constitutes around 72 per cent of its total sales.